Three thousand kilometers roll by as the Trans-Siberian Railway travels from Moscow to Novosibirsk, along with Mathias. For three days, the train stirs up memories and moods, stories of Russia, its history, inhabitants, and books, stories of Mathias, his love Jeanne, Vladimir, and their triangle of wild friendship and unfulfilled love. A rush, a flow of thoughts among millions of white birches and ghosts, for one always travels with the dead in tow, discovering the fragments of a narrative scattered like the villages along the railway to the Pacific Ocean. Mathias Énard's little novel traverses personal and spatial continents, telling the grand story of insatiable longing, archetypes, and unattainable dreams - of a storyteller, a country, a generation.